“I’m sorry, it’s terminal”
Those are some of the worst words a guy can hear.
Awful.
Just… awful.
But those were the words I was hearing from my doctor.
He said, “There’s really not much we can do, so I just put everything back together and we’ll just hope for the best. It could take two weeks or two years, we just don’t know”.
Well okay, it wasn’t my doctor telling me this, it was my bike’s doctor.
I knew my ride had some chronic issues… a welded rear chainstay and squishy front brakes. These were important, but on a bike that’s been through almost eight years of daily commutes, freeriding, urban assault, and seven prairie winters, a few scars are expected. They are badges of honour. You can almost hear the old goat showing those scars off to the baby blue cutie at the coffee shop, “Yeah, I got this dent when my rider dropped in on a 10ft rock face. We almost bit it, but I managed to pull him out”.
Anyway, I had dropped off my faithful rig for some fork maintenance and a spring tune-up. You know the drill, a new rear sprocket and chain, replace the cables, give it the once over for anything else.
Unfortunately, that anything else turned out to be bad… really bad. I knew my bottom bracket had a little flex and I thought I just needed to replace it. As it turned out, it wasn’t just my bottom bracket, it was the threads for the bottom bracket mounting rings, the threads were… well, gone. And the only thing keeping the bottom bracket from sliding out were the cranks.
So there was my mechanic telling me the bad news that this was terminal, so just go riding until it dies.
He did tell me that there was one option, a radical European treatment that involved re-threading the housing to a strange Euro sizing and then using a special bottom bracket. This would have involved many weeks (of waiting for parts and tooling) and lots of money. I had the time, but not the money. And let’s be frank, who’s going to drop big money on an eight year old rig? Yeah, sure, eight years ago my rig was at the cutting edge of technology, Hayes hydraulic disc brakes with 6 inch rotors, four bar rear suspension with a Fox air shock, and a whooping 4 inches of travel front and rear! Four inches! I can’t tell you how plush it felt. But that was then and this is now.
Now it seems that even the hardtails have four inches of rear travel.
Now my trusty steed is quaint and even vintage.
And so, instead of wallowing in my sorrow, I rode. After all, it’s better to go out with a bang than with a whimper.
I rode to work. I rode with my kids. I rode at the bike park. And, I took my old steed down some of the steepest and sketchiest trails it had ever seen.
I knew the end would come some day, so I rode each day like it was the last time I’d ever ride my faithful rig. And then, on a cold, wet day late last fall, that day came. It happened while riding a slippery skinny stunt at the bottom end of Upper Oasis.
It’s weird because I didn’t even notice until we were several pedal stokes past the stunt. Suddenly I just couldn’t pedal. A mounting ring had cracked and was continually unthreading itself, I could thread it in and get a handful of pedal strokes in before it would undo itself again. I managed to nurse the bike through the rest of the ride (thankfully it was mostly downhill). It even managed to hold together for one last visit to the bike park with my boys.
But I know it.
It’s done.
It’s glory days are behind it. The dust, stunts, skateparks, dirt jumps, rocks, roots, creeks, crazy downs and leg burning ups, all done.
I’m hoping the local shop can bandage the bottom bracket enough so that I can ride my old bike for commuting to work and other on-pavement riding, but that’s all, no more off-road. And you know what, I’m okay with that.
In retrospect, I think it was fitting that my most faithful riding partner would meet it’s demise on singletrack.
The picture is burned into my memory… a prairie boy on his old x-country bike riding a stunt that his local buddies and their “Gucci” rigs passed on.
Yeah, when I think about it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
